Preet Bharara Criticizes Gov. Cuomo For Closing Corruption Commission

U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, at a news conference on April 1.

Getty

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara sharply condemned Gov. Andrew Cuomo Thursday for shuttering a commission to probe public corruption—and announced his office would take over its investigations.

“Nine months may be the proper and natural gestation period for a child, but in our experience not the amount of time necessary for a public corruption prosecution to mature,” Mr. Bharara said in an interview on “The Brian Lehrer Show” on WNYC about Mr. Cuomo’s decision to shut down the Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption.

“We just want to get our hands on the files and make sure that the work is getting done, because that was not clear to me last week,” he said.

The governor convened the commission in July, after state lawmakers failed to enact reform measures he sought amid a string of high-profile arrests of legislators. But last month, after some of those reform measures, such as a tougher bribery statute, were included in the state budget agreement, Mr. Cuomo announced he would disband the investigative body.

On Thursday morning, Mr. Bharara said, trucks from the U.S. Attorney’s office were sent to pick up investigative files from the commission so that federal prosecutors could determine whether and how to pursue any matters that had been under examination.

The commission hadn’t said what would happen to its files, but Mr. Bharara’s office has long had some association with the commission.

It is the work of Mr. Bharara’s office that triggered the arrests that led to the creation of the Moreland Commssion in the first place; Mr. Bharara testified at the commission’s first public hearing.

Days after the budget agreement, on April 3, Mr. Bharara wrote to the co-chairs of the commission and several of its top staffers, saying that “it is difficult to understand why the Moreland Commission was terminated while these active investigations remained ongoing.”

He added: “The sequence of these events gives the appearance, although I am sure this is not the intent, that investigations potentially significant to the public interest have been bargained away as part of the negotiated arrangement between legislative and executive leaders.”

Mr. Bharara met with the two co-chairs of the commission on Wednesday, he said on Mr. Lehrer’s show, and in a letter dated that day, Mr. Bharara informed the Moreland commissioners that the co-chairs had directed all of the group’s files and investigative work to be provided to his office.

Asked about media reports that Mr. Cuomo’s top aides interfered in the commission’s decisions about subpoenas and other investigative matters, Mr. Bharara declined to say whether he would probe the governor’s office about such alleged activity.

“I don’t know what all the facts are there,” Mr. Bharara said. “What I can tell you is, it is impossible to overstate the importance of independence on the part of any investigative body.”

Mr. Bharara added, “I’m not going to prejudge what we’re going to be looking at, what we’re going to be investigating and where the facts will lead.”